You never want a serious crisis to go to waste – Rahm Emanuel
President Barack Obama Nancy Pelosi just couldn’t wait to get going on her landmark health care reform bill. With the President’s popularity dropping and 2010 coming up fast, Democratic leaders know they need a flagship program to justify the maintenance of their supermajority. Health care provides that opportunity, and the public’s openness to being scared into accepting any crap bill that comes up for a vote (stimulus, anyone?) has created a match made in Heaven.
Surprisingly large initial opposition, though, forced the President to attempt a heavy-handed lobbying effort on the bill’s behalf. With the clock ticking till Congress’ August recess and the President’s credibility, and therefore his access to an effective bully pulpit, threatening to run out well before that’s over, Pelosi and Co. have now attempted to blow through a bill that will nationalize 20% of the economy is just three weeks.
The bill was thrown to all committees at once last Thursday morning, in an attempt to ram it through before anyone could read it. The problem? Some people did.
Attacking the Democrat bill, though effectively done so far, seems to be a difficult task, because there is so much fertile ground – where does one start?
Taxes
The Dems don’t want you to know it, but there’s more to paying for this bill than the crippling tax increases on small businesses. People are going to be to buy health insurance, whether they are subsidized or not, meaning those above the lower cutoff – also known as the middle class – are going to see tax penalties for not buying what the government tells them to buy.
This is to decrease the amount of people that get hurt or sick while uninsured, which traditionally lowers the premiums that have to be charged to those with insurance to pay for them. In this case, however, we’re talking about the federal government penalizing people in an attempt force them to buy in, which lowers the premiums for a public option.
The public “option” is the facet of the bill that is supposedly negotiable, even though several other aspects of it seem to exist only to support it. Democrats may talk about being willing to deal on it, but there will always be at least some form of a trigger, since this is their only chance to open a door to a single-payer system. If they don’t accomplish this drastic change in the way people manage their own care now, they might not get another shot.
Abortion
Conservatives are starting to notice hidden gem in the bill, much to the President’s chagrin. He may not want us to get ‘distracted’ by this argument, but he’s just wasting his breath. Telling pro-lifers to go along with his legislation now and worry about its effects on the unborn later is like George Bush telling Code Pink to go ahead and just re-elect him in 2004 and trust he’ll do the right thing in Iraq because the tax cuts were the bigger issue. There’s just no way to convince people to look the other way and pretend that this issue doesn’t exist, because it most certainly does.
Say what you want about the abortion debate, but the one thing that has kept it from boiling over on several occasions is that pro-lifers could go to bed at night knowing that their tax dollars were not being used to subsidize abortions. The health care bill being discussed now, though, puts that funding at the discretion of an as of yet unknown Secretary.
Expansion of abortion has never been something legislators would want to show off, so any legislation in favor of the pro-choice agenda has to be snuck in like this. Sweeping legislation that flies through committee and receives a vote before most people can get their hands on a copy is as good a place as any to prop open a back door in the Hyde Amendment.
Spending
Democrats have always been pretty smart in figuring out how to be elected – you just take money away from the people who won’t vote for you and give it to those who will. As long as you steal a lot from a few people and give it to a majority, you can keep doing this over and over with a mob rule mentality.
Because of this, spending lots of money on flashy, useless projects has become a staple of government. Legislators would rather throw tons of money at a problem than get down to the nuts and bolts and figure it out. Even if it doesn’t actually do anything constructive, throwing money at the problem is some perverse way of showing that you care. This is how you get $400 hammers – Congressman So and So wasted a ton of money, but he sure did get us that hammer.
Health care is no different, as the Democrats want to spend a in order to look like they’re trying. The plan , but then you just get to play the hero again by throwing more money at it. The only drawback is that the public doesn’t like deficit spending – something about spending money you don’t have strikes the average person the wrong way.
So President Obama just about it and says that this bill won’t increase the deficit and that we should all just accept it as is. After all, once it passes, they’ll work out all of the – you just need to support it blindly right now.
In order to have their cake and eat it too by playing hero to the poor at the expense of those who don’t matter (everyone else) and doing it with no supposed drawbacks, they need to get the bill through fast and not let it be decided by its numerical merits… because it doesn’t have any.
Government Control
Similarly, if the government controls more aspects of your life, then it is constantly doing more for you. That way, the people running government are doing more for you, which means that you should keep voting for them. It is in this great line of thinking that the current D.C. leadership plans to operate, working to get as many people as possible on their government insurance plan.
They’ll tell you that you can keep your own doctor and keep living like you always have, but you can’t. Last week saw the now infamous piece that questioned whether private insurance would be outlawed. It turns out that it be (), but either way the ensuing regulations will expense the plans out of existence.
Obama was recently as saying that he was unfamiliar with that controversial section of the bill. Bullshit. He knows exactly what’s in there, because it’s the whole point of the thing. You’re going to get on the public insurance plan and like it. Without forcing a majority of Americans onto the plan, the savings for the poorest (Democratic) voters are harder to attain because of negotiating power and simple economies of scale in operating the behemoth.
Lest there be any doubt, the American Spectator ran a study to see how many businesses would be squeezed by this plan and the ensuing rate hikes of private insurers as they deal with increased regulation. They found that businesses employing a total of would have to stop offering their plans – pushing those people onto the government plan.
This is just fine for the Dem leadership in Congress – if they control your health care, then they can take credit for being nice enough to provide such a huge facet of everyday life. They don’t want you to remember what their mismanagement replaced or what you had to give up in giving them control. You need to remember, though, so that we can fight back against it.
If conservative Democrats can hold out for the right to read the legislation, or at least have some questions answered, we stand a chance of making it to the August recess. Make it there and we have a month to educate the public on what will happen to them on an individual level if this ‘reform’ passes, which is our only shot at pressuring Congress into huge concessions or into giving up. Passing it before the public knows what hit them is the Democrats’ only shot, and its now or never to make them miss.
Last 5 posts by Gideon D'Assandro
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